Sony adds large-screen Ultrabooks to Vaio lineup

Sony has started shipping two new Vaio Ultrabooks with large screens starting at $699 as the company expands its lineup of thin and light laptops.

The Vaio T Series 14 and 15 Ultrabooks have Intel's Core processors based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. The Ultrabooks have Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system.

The laptops are targeted at students and professionals, Sony said in a statement. A unique feature of the laptops is the ability to combine hard drives with low-capacity 24GB solid-state drives, which can be used to store operating systems. SSDs are typically faster than hard drives and can help laptops boot and perform faster.

The T Series 15 Ultrabook is priced starting at $799 and has a 15-inch touchscreen that can display images at a 1920-by-1080-pixel resolution. The laptop weighs 2.35 kilograms with an internal battery.

The T Series 14 Ultrabook has a 14-inch screen with a 1366-by-768-pixel resolution. The non-touch version of the laptop starts at $699, while a touchscreen version starts at $799. The laptop weighs 1.86 kilograms.

The laptops will support up to 8GB of memory and offer options of 1TB or 512GB SSD storage. Other features include a webcam, USB 3.0 port, HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) port and an SD card reader.